Believe in People: the Essential Karel Capek: review

Nicholas Shakespeare delights in the wisdom of Karel Capek, a Czech
Montaigne

By Nicholas Shakespeare

5:36PM BST 20 Aug 2010

On March 15 1939, as German occupying forces advanced on Prague, the Gestapo arrived at the home of No 3 on their most wanted list – only to discover that Karel Capek had been dead for three months. The novelist and dramatist had caught a chill that developed into pneumonia, but according to his doctor “those who say that Munich killed him also have a great deal of the truth”.

Believe in People: the essential Karel Capek

Capek was a world-class writer, but is little regarded here as was once his “small and relatively happy” country, dismissed by Neville Chamberlain in Munich as faraway and full of people of whom we know nothing. In an unpublished letter written shortly before his death and addressed to an “unknown British reader”, a heartbroken Capek predicted that we, who permitted Hitler to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, have shared reasons for pity, shame and protest, since “what has happened on Czechoslovak ground is in large measure a part of British, as much as French and European, fate”.

One of the many pleasures of reading Believe in People, a collection of Capek’s journalism and letters translated here for the first time, is to gain the acquaintance of a sensibility as universal and relevant as Kafka’s, and yet bracingly unfamiliar. As John Carey suggests in his excellent preface: “There is no English writer like him”.

Here’s how the inventor of the word “robot” typically saw things: “Sometimes it can make your hair stand on end to see what can raise a laugh.” “Imagine the silence if people said only what they know!” “Only little people fight for prestige; great people have it.”

A freer spirit than the Catholic writer G K Chesterton, whom he met on a visit to London in 1924, and more optimistic than George Orwell, Capek closer resembles a Czech Montaigne. “I like scepticism as inordinately as enthusiasm,” he writes playfully. “I take care to learn from anything that I stumble on.”

The son of a country doctor, Capek viewed himself as a physician who helps others, but with words. “In my own way I also try to do doctoring.” In the daily practice of journalism, he spins unfading pieces out of the important issues of the day and also out of ephemera. Flowers, dogs, cats – “because they truly exist” – are no less worthy of his curiosity than New Year’s resolutions or toothache; or, come to that, “the fanatical dopiness of our times”. What his critics describe as relativism, he prefers to call “an anxious attentiveness to everything that exists”.

The notion that Capek, a mild-mannered invalid with a passionate and humane heart, could pose a threat to Nazi rule is at first glance risible, but that would be to ignore the impact of his clear, subversive gaze. It is a gaze that remains fresh and contemporary, and which privileges looking above judging (“the hardest and highest optical task” is just to see), individuals above humankind (when he thinks of England, he sees an old man with garden shears in his hands and a girl pedalling solemnly by), lucidity above cliché: “The moment a thing is expressed lucidly, it’s immediately evident if it’s true or false.” Nothing was clearer to Capek than the difference – which he made it his unflinching duty to point out.

High on the list of Capek’s false gods were critics who judged sharply from only one angle (“every single angle is only a section of the 360-degree reality”). He also despised elitists (a writer should be like a baker baking bread for everyone) and religious or political fundamentalists. In one of his best and most contentious essays, “Why Am I Not a Communist?”, he condemns communism for its blunting of language and its pathological negativism. He was the opposite – and suffered from the relentlessly positive impulse to see only the best, a position that exposed him to charges of “bovine sentimentality”.

One of his truest passions was the actress Olga Scheinpflugova. He met her when she was 17 and he 30, and they married one abortion and 15 troubled years later. His letters to her, while lyrical, are not without their bovine side (“I’m writing to you with your sweet stockings in my lap”).

In one letter to Olga, Capek wrote: “Ah, if you want to be a great artist, you must undergo the torture of being a great human being.” His lyricism has the sadness of a snatched and threatened pleasure, like a breath gulped too deep. Never too far away is the pain caused by his spinal disease and the brutal times in which he battles to live, while at the same time celebrating “the swarming of life”. He believes that “nothing is true without steadfastness” and is steadfast to the end, in his love of Olga, of other people, of the whole world with all its jiggery-pokery. “One day, I’d like to write a book that would be so good and strong as to grip a person suffering from an inflamed tooth.”